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A Stardew Valley fan who recently lost their partner, with whom they'd been playing a co-op save of the game for several years, received advice from Eric 'ConcernedApe' Barone, the creator of the game, on how to recover the save file for their shared farm.
"This is a wild shot in the dark, but I am desperately hoping someone can help me," Holly Christine wrote on X/Twitter on Sunday.
Christine's partner had been running their co-op farm and died suddenly on Thursday, she explained. "While it will never be the same without him, I would love to have everything we built together," she said. "If there is anything you can do to help me with this, it would mean the world to me to have our little dream world back."
Saves like this are generally recoverable. Christine tagged the Steam X/Twitter account in her post and shared a photo of her desktop setup, indicating she and her partner played on Windows PCs.
Barone responded the same day, saying: "I'm really sorry for your loss. In order to access that save file, you'd need access to his computer, or be able to log into his Steam account (if he had cloud saves enabled). On Windows, saves in %appdata%/StardewValley/Saves. Look for the folder with the farm's name."
Stardew Valley players have helped fans hunt down shared save files before, and co-op farms can indeed be edited or duplicated. The Stardew Valley Wiki has a helpful page on the subject.
These saves are formatted as "[Farm name]_[Numbers]". The parent folder Barone mentions can quickly be found by opening a Run search (Windows key + R on Windows 11), searching "%appdata%", and then navigating to the Stardew Valley folder.
